


Second Desk

by somekindofseizure



Category: The X-Files
Genre: Desk Sex, Episode: s04e13 Never Again, MSR, over the clothes action
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-09
Updated: 2016-02-09
Packaged: 2018-05-19 05:48:02
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,025
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5955957
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/somekindofseizure/pseuds/somekindofseizure
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After Scully gets out of the hospital in "Never Again," Mulder gets to see Scully's tattoo, and Scully gets a desk.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Second Desk

She had been sulking for days.  She came to work, she did any tasks that he asked of her, she was even still bringing him coffee when she bought her own.  But she did it all with a very specific Scullified brand of _I don’t want to be here_.  Great, so he still was expected to prove the unproveable, explain the inexplicable, and overpower the all-powerful – but now, do it with an angry redhead coldly swanning around the office.  

Scully was being childish. Speaking of childish, _I send you on one assignment by yourself and you have to have a one-night stand, really_?  And not just any one-night stand, no - a raucous motherfucker of debauchery that crescendoed in branding herself with a snake and concluded with her nearly annihilated and in a hospital.  Her thoroughness touched all.  

It wasn’t like he didn’t think Scully ever had sex… Well, actually, it was like that.  He had to think that.  She was his Voice of Reason, she was his GPS.  And now, his GPS was sitting in front of him every day like a ginger tomcat that had gotten out and played rough with the wrong gang of strays. Aloof and feral under her red hair, bearing wounds like scabby badges of street cred.

Even when he was able to wrangle his jealousy, he found no peace.  Because waiting in the wings of Facts about that night was:  she had been in pretty grave danger.  Bringing her back to the office was like picking up a defiant teenager from a wild party.  He had to keep reminding himself, _Well, at least she’s still alive_ just to avoid scolding her.  And he found himself retroactively, pointlessly, worrying, as if thinking about helping her could turn back the clocks and actually allow him to rescue her. _Not that she had expressed any desire to have been rescued._

He found himself trying to avoid looking at her, otherwise he risked his eye catching, snagging on one of her bruises, like a cotton sock dragged over a dry heel.  It forced him to imagine how hard the impact must have been, how hard she must have fought back, how her adrenaline probably pumped through her veins, turning her fear to fire.  He had made her fight for her life – Mulder wanted to make him fight for his.

And lately, while he stood waiting for her to say, _Are you fucking kidding me with this theory, Mulder_ in some fresh, new way, he couldn’t help but notice the way her cheekbone sloped under the scrape, the luminous skin around the bruise on her forehead, the way it encased a whole world of thoughts she never shared with him. After spending his adult life chasing beautiful mysteries, you’d think he have recognized it sooner when one was bringing him coffee every morning.  

“Mulder.”

She’d caught him staring.

“You dazed off again,” she said greyly, as if it had nothing to do with her, as if she were a wall or a table or a chair his gaze happened to land upon.  

He wanted so badly to bring her back that one night, he thought of getting that Yankee tattoo on his ass, just for the fun of coming in and showing it to her.  He thought of how she’d spit-take her coffee and cackle. But if it didn’t work, two unwanted tattoos was a lot for such a tiny office.

And then one day it came to him.  He could just get her the thing she had asked for. A desk.  

He was chaperoned by a janitor to a room full of the FBI’s office furniture stock.  Mulder browsed the desks as if he were picking out a puppy, an engagement ring, asking the janitor for his input, describing Scully’s work habits to him.   Mulder landed on what seemed to be the star desk in the room.  

“That’s the executive,” the janitor grumbled. _Perfect._ Mulder bent over and started to move the desk while the both the janitor and the desk stood still.

“You’ll just have it brought over,” Mulder said to the janitor, dusting off his hands.

They were due any minute now.  Scully was out performing an autopsy – a bogus one that he’d invented just to get her out of the office.  Hopefully pointlessly dissecting a human being would be worth the surprise of the executive special.

***

 _I am not doing this autopsy,_ Scully thought.  There was absolutely no way it was an x-file.  She called for an orderly and rolled the body back where it belonged, impatiently filling out the necessary paperwork.  She wished she could write on it, _“My partner’s an idiot._ ”  She fortunately had many technical, sophisticated ways of saying it by now.

She knew she was being unfair.  He was not the one who talked her into getting a tattoo by some kind of Russian convict. He was not the one who’d tried to kill her.  It wasn’t his fault that she had given up a life of medicine, joined the FBI, walked into his office and never walked out.  Or maybe it was.  He had some kind of power over her, this much was clear.  But she knew that to Mulder, the whole trip to Pittsburgh was a little temper tantrum to the tune of, _You’re not the boss of me._

He had no way of knowing how desperately she had needed to get out from under that power, get out of her own skin, escape the fate that was bouldering toward her.  Simply put, if she were going to die soon, she wanted to get laid.  Yes, she had gotten a tattoo, so what?  Knowing her, it would be another five years before anyone else saw it. _If I live that long._  She had rebelled, and she had gotten caught once again.

This punishment was a far cry from the swift, sterile kind her father would have dealt.  It was silent, a slow poisonous simmering sentence dealt in the form of constant reminders.  She might not have to see the tattoo every day (thank God she’d had the presence of mind to give him her back and not her arm or her chest or her ankle, even.)  But no such luck with the marks on her face.  Day after day, she recounted the entire experience to herself in the mirror as she applied anti-scarring gel.   _This is what you get for having fun._ Ed’s tattoo spoke to him.  The wounds he’d inflicted spoke to Scully.  

With the autopsy nullified, she had a couple hours to kill before she was expected back.  She longed to turn them into emotional progress. The nauseating unease she’d had before Pittsburgh had not waned.  She could go to church, but there was no part of the experience for which she sought redemption, and she couldn’t bear to beg for her life just yet.  She could go home and clean her apartment, which she’d been neglecting.  A movie… shopping… The thing was, what she really wanted to do was go back to the office. She chewed her cheek and put her sunglasses on emphatically as she walked back out into the city.   _Well, that’s pretty fucking annoying._

***

It was evening when Scully finally returned to the office.   Mulder had fallen asleep on his desk, his shirt untucked and rumpled.   He woke to the sound of her heels coming down the hall and tried to rouse some of the enthusiasm he’d lost since this afternoon.

She stepped inside and seemed frozen in shock.  Another possible reason for standing still:  there was nowhere else to go.  The desk took up every godammn inch of remaining space in the office.  It was a monster.  But if it would make her happy again, he was willing to stack three of them in there.  

“Well?” he asked.

“Mulder… what?... you…”

“Perhaps _thank you_ has been buried under your massive vocabulary,” he said.

“It’s…” she walked along the edge of it, following the sharp edge to her tucked chair.  There was barely enough room for her to pull it out. She inched in sideways.  Her little waist twisting, her hips swiveling... He wasn’t going to get anything done with this desk around.  Finally, mercifully, she was sitting.  

“Mulder, this is very nice. But I think it’s too big.”

“I’ve heard that before,” he joked, uncomfortable with the sentiment behind the desk… which was the whole point of the desk… since it was obviously ridiculous in every other practical sense… so now it was all seeming pointless.  Regret twinged in his chest.   _This was stupid._

“There are freshly sharpened pencils in this top drawer.”

He shrugged.

“Thank you,” she said looking up at him, and as she smiled sincerely at him, his regret dispersed and fluttered away.  He could think of no equal response to a smile like that, so he nodded, nodded again… three times.  Finally, he came up with, “Why did you come back here?”

“Did you actually think I’d run away after the autopsy?”

“Did you actually do the autopsy?”

“No, of course not.”  She looked up to the corner as if preoccupied. “I just came back here because I have some work to catch up on.”

He nodded some more.

“Did you wait here just for me to get back?” she asked crinkling her forehead.

“Nah, I just… I was about to leave” He turned abruptly to the door, not bothering to finish the excuse.  “Night, Scully.”

“Mulder,” she said, louder than she meant to.  She licked her lips self-consciously and asked, “Do you have to go?”

He closed the door and hovered.

“I came back here because,” she paused to take a breath – “I came back because I don’t want to be alone.”

He swung back to his desk. The staleness of having sat there all day had faded sometime between her smile and her request.  The whole room felt different now – and of course, it was different. _Cause there’s another giant fucking desk in it._  Though the amount of furniture between them had doubled, he was finally feeling close to her again.

***

Mulder had his feet up on his desk, his tie loosened.  “I can’t believe you’re not going to show it to me,” he said, circling his beer in a pool of condensation in the center of his desk.  He had cleared space to play cards with her, but the box sat untouched next to his hand.  They had started talking while trying to decide what game to play.  Now they were definitely playing something, but it wasn’t cards.  

The idea of showing him the tattoo was absurd to her.  “Come on, Mulder!  You saw the description in the report!”

“Not the same.”

She tried to switch focus to him, a Mulder-proof tactic.  “What did you do in Graceland?  You never really told me.”

“I mostly called you,” he said grinning sheepishly.

“Have you… have you heard anything about Ed?” she asked.

“No, I haven’t bothered to check in on it.  Do you… want to see him again?”

“No,” she said quickly. She didn’t.  She was simply disoriented by the idea that he had been inside her and now she would never see him again.  She wondered if this is how it would have felt had it been a simple one-night stand, and not the tragic, heightened, _my tattoo wants me to kill you_ , version it turned out to be.  

She was staring at the label on her beer, peeling it with her thumb, when she heard Mulder gulp loudly, showily, his lips making a suctiony noise as he pulled the bottle from his mouth.  It was a hostile sound.  He had taken her silence to mean she was thinking longingly of Ed.   _Not this macho bullshit again_ , she thought, ready to tear into him.   _I should have gone home_.  But when she looked up, the expression on his face changed her mind.

“It didn’t mean anything,” she said, feeling presumptuous for saying so, but he stared at her, waiting for her to say more.  “It meant something obviously, because you know, I got the tattoo and also nearly was killed.  So it was memorable in that sense.  But he was… just sex.”

She could swear he just flinched when she said sex. He still seemed to be waiting for her to say something.  Maybe it was that, or the beer – or she just was tired of carrying it around – she kept talking.

“We didn’t even sleep together.  I mean, afterwards, I was going to sleep on the couch.  But he offered…”

“Yeah, a real mensch,” said Mulder sarcastically, but not harshly.

“I probably wouldn’t have seen him again regardless.”

“What?  Not a star in the sack?” he said jovially.

“It was fine.”  She thought of Ed’s nice arms, his towering height, the intensity in his eyes.  It had been more than fine.  Not trip to the basement incinerator worthy, for sure, but good.  She pursed her lips, the stale alcohol on them reading her like a weather report. _It is currently tipsy and warm in Dana Scully._

He seemed to be willing to hear more.  She rewound her mind through the night, before the sex, the bloody shirt, the tattoo, the conversation in the bar, wanting to find something else appropriate to share with him, suddenly yearning to be understood by him.  But after seeing his possessive streak, she didn’t want to make anything worse.

“I think I just wanted to feel noticed,” she said.  “By him, myself,” she hesitated and intended to swallow the words but they escaped her grasp on a wild exhale.  “By you.”

He was staring at her, his expression infuriatingly opaque, his beautiful eyes layered with meaning as incomprehensible as his theories.  She felt her heart beat in her ears, as if underwater, and she realized she was sweating.  She stood up – rather, tried to stand up, but the chair hit a file cabinet and trapped her. He laughed.

“Did you need something over here?  Probably better if I just get it.  We’ll have to work out a system,” he said.

She was shaking off her blazer.  “Just a little hot,” she said and wiggled back down into the desk in her tank top. She played with the drawers.  “So much storage, Mulder,” she marveled.  He looked tickled.  “I thought you’d like that,” he said.

“Yes,” she said quietly.

“Did it hurt?” he blurted at her.  “The tattoo?” he clarified.  “I’m really asking.”

“You thinking of getting one?”

“Hey, I have wild nights too.”

“Yes, I know, even sometimes afternoons,” she said glancing at his VHS drawer.

He threw his tie at her. It could not quite clear the expanse, and it landed splayed across her desk.  She reached for the tip of it and took it into her hands as she answered, “Yes and no. It hurt but…”  She had over-articulated the “tah” at the end of _but_ without meaning to.

He waited.  She shook her head as if there was nothing else.  But he nodded, his eyebrows raised, pushing her. _Come on, Scully_ , his face begged.   This was Mulder’s kindest face – the one that meant he was not going to judge her no matter what she said.  Focusing on the silk between her fingers, she half squinted, half smiled, wondering if she would regret this…

“It was a good kind of hurt.”  

***

Everything in the room was spinning, except for Scully.  She sat before him, hot and sinking like a sunset as the background blurred and rushed past her.  He knew he wasn’t drunk, so it had to be that Scully was performing some kind of wizardry on him.  The words had rolled off her tongue in a tone of voice he had never heard her use before, one that made him inadvertently clench his fists.  

She was playing with his tie, and suddenly all he could think was, _what if it were around my neck?_  He felt it slide back and forth shuffling the hair on his neck, felt her tug it as she pulled him toward her.  Her mouth was open and when she moved, the tip of her tongue caught the light and gleamed.  He saw her clamp the tie between her teeth as she took her shirt off.

No.  She wasn’t doing that.

He concentrated on slowing his breathing and dropped his legs down, hiding behind the desk.  Actually, maybe this second desk thing was a good idea since his subconscious had finally decided recognize his partner as a sexual being.  It was extra protection. 

She finished stroking his tie and gracefully rolled it up in her perfectly manicured fingers.  He had never seen her wear red nail polish before.

“I got them done today,” she said, apparently following his focus.

“When you were cutting class?”

“Yes,” she said and smiled apologetically.  “But I’m done acting out.  I promise.”

That tone of voice again.

“Good,” he said, after a longer pause than he had intended.  “Any more infractions and I’ll lock you in the bottom drawer of that desk.”

“Mulder, I think _you_ could fit in the bottom drawer of this desk.”

She swooshed his tie back at him across the field of desks, but it lost momentum and dangled in limbo to the floor between the two.  She leaned forward to get it but couldn’t reach so she bent all the way forward, her feet lifting and shaking off her shoes with her determined eye on the tie.

The tie may as well have stopped existing as far as Mulder was concerned.  She was lying flat against the desk on her stomach.  She was laughing.  He could see down her shirt to her black bra.  He sighed longer and louder than he meant to as she looked up at him, cleavage bared beneath her chin.   _Oh come on._

“Come on, Mulder... Mulder are you okay? Come on,”  she urged playfully.  He realized she was trying to toss the tie back to him.  He caught it, and as she was about to slide back to her chair, he stood up, reached and sharply grabbed her wrist.  

 

***

He swung the tie into an upside down U around his neck.  “Let me see it,” he pled.

She broke his gentle grasp on her wrist with the intention of putting more distance between them, but his eyes were doing that _I dare you to refuse me anything I ask_ thing.  She hadn’t shown anyone the tattoo except for psychopaths and doctors. There was something tempting about sharing it, releasing it.  It was like she was trying to hold onto a fistful of sand, and if she let it go, her fingers could wiggle, be free again.

She slid on her shins until she was sitting right in front of him on the desk, then squirmed to face away from him and put her hands on the bottom of her shirt to reveal her lower back… but he beat her to it.  His fingers brushed her skin, soft as a paintbrush, as he lifted the shirt over her floating ribs.  She dropped her own hands to her lap, idly twiddling her fingers.  He was close enough that she could feel his breath on her back where the shirt scooped beneath her hair.  

“Well?” she asked.

He was moving down her spine like a perverse vertical breeze, sending the hairs on her arms to attention, ordering her nipples to apply pressure to the light padding of her bra. A vortex formed where his breath, his fingers and her skin met.  He was studying the tattoo, tracing it, like a photo of a crop circle.  

She felt heat generate between her legs.  She shifted so that she was kneeling with her feet directly under her pubic bone, the edge of her heel pressing into the source and executioner of her desire.  Stifling it or encouraging it – she wasn’t sure which she was attempting.

“Actually, it’s really nice,” he said.

“You don’t sound very convincing.”

“That’s because I’m distracted,” he cooed, his voice gritty.

She didn’t ask _By what?_  She knew what he meant.  

He brought his hands to the hem of her tank top and pulled it back into place.   _Slowly… slowly… so very fucking slowly_.  He patted the sides of her waist as if to confirm its existence.  Her stomach flipped over like a fish, tail first.

She spun around, draping her legs over the front of the desk.  Her shins brushed his thighs as he looked down her, staring at her bare shoulder as he lifted the end of a piece of her hair, twirling it awesomely like it was spun gold, or a spool of extraterrestrial yarn.

“Tell me, Scully,” he said in a sweet, inquisitive voice.

 “What else do you want to know?  I showed it to you.”

 “Not that.  Him.  Your night together.”  That sounded less innocent.

 His voice was tender and his eyebrows pressed into an upside down V.  Their four pupils were locked in a standoff, waiting to see which would draw first.  She feared he could see her heart beating harder in her eyes as she felt the lids of them quiver.

 “What do you want to know?” she asked in a reckless whisper.

 “All of it.”

 She blinked finally, face flushing.  She wanted to answer him, but couldn’t find the words.

 “You were at his place,” he suggested.

 “Yes.”

 “He kissed you.”

 “Yes. And, um, we moved to the couch.  We took our clothes off.”

 She felt a bit silly, but Mulder looked like he was listening to the story of the century. It was intoxicating to have him here, hanging on her every word.  Usually, that was her job.  She had to do it just to figure out what the hell he was talking about.  

 “Sit down,” she ordered Mulder, and he obeyed.  

 “I was on top of him. I hadn’t taken my underwear off because I thought it would go more slowly.  But he was touching me…” Her confidence grew, her concerns receding. These were just words, they could recover from words.  

 She arched her lower back and pressed her center into the hard wood desk, spreading her thighs a bit to gain access to the surface through her silk crepe pants.  She dangled a bare foot so that it loosely brushed the leg of his pant like a pendulum.

 “Go on, Scully,” he implored.

 “He moved my underwear out of the way, to the side, holding them here,” she demonstrated with her hands near the cusp of her joint.  “He let me guide him and at first, I worked him in slowly,” she said matter-of-factly. “But then I just – and it was painful –“

 “His being all the way inside you.”

 She nodded, and rested a foot on his thigh.  He drew a breath and held it.  Encouraged, she rested her other foot on his other leg.  The grassy scent of her own arousal emboldened her.    

 “But it also felt good. To fuck someone.”

 The word landed in the room like a UFO.  His hazel eyes spread across his face, twinkling.  They did not move or adjust from her in any way.

 “Did he get you off, Scully?”

 “I got myself off.”

 “Did you say anything while you were…”

 “I don’t remember,” she said.  That was true.  She could have lied one way or another, but she didn’t want to.  Maybe this conversation should have felt terribly wrong, but it didn’t. Rather, it seemed to her bizarrely, sacredly honest.  The least inappropriate thing that had happened to her in weeks.

 He pulled her foot toward him, climbing her leg hand over hand as his chair rolled toward her.  As he reached the edge of the desk, his face at her hip-level, she unraveled into him, landing softly in his lap, her knees straddling his thighs, her hands on his shoulders.  He clasped her shoulder blade and lower back.  She wondered if it was on her tattoo, she still couldn’t pinpoint its exact location without looking.  She felt her skin melting into him and pulling away from him simultaneously.

 He was already hard and impressive beneath her, stiffening and reaching for her exactly where she wanted to be touched.  The possibility of the moment swelled and paralyzed them into suspension.  His bottom lip twitched, smooth and soft. She imagined it on her skin, her mouth, her pelvic bones – she was sure he would put his mouth over her pelvic bones, tease her until she… She shook her focus.  He was looking at her lips.

 “Don’t,” she warned definitively, softly.

 “No,” he agreed.

 She wrapped her arms around his neck and pressed flat against him, as she had against the desk earlier, and he squeezed her tight into a hug.  

 “I’m sorry,” he said into her hair gravely, so that she knew he was talking about _everything_ , about whatever he had done to lead her to Ed, about how he had acted afterwards.

 “I’m sorry too,” she said into his collar.  She found his warm neck, the scent of his skin meshing with starched cotton, luring her, reeling her in to him.  She traced it with the pointy tip of her nose, sneaking it into the crease between the fabric and his neck.  She could feel his pulse against her cheek.

 And she could feel it between her legs as his blood rushed to serve him.   _He’s harder than that oak desk_ , she marveled.  She wished she could ask him to consume her before somethign else did. At first, her hips rolled imperceptibly – tiny, immeasurable temblors, barely able to tip the scale.  

 Apparently, she had been wrong, she was not done acting out just yet.  

 

***

He felt her abdomen tense sharply as she pressed against him.   She was grinding against his cock and breathing onto his neck.  Her lip balm stuck to the rough skin where he usually dragged a razor, her face a distant memory.  As if, as long she didn’t look at him, what was happening would not be real.   He tried to subdue the image she’d painted of herself half naked on top of a man, panties pulled to the side in a frenzied fuck, tried to remember she was someone he did not want to push.

 He nestled his face in her hair and gripped her tighter, running his fingers along her back, her bare arms.  He tried to force away the image of her lying back against the desk as he took his dick from his pants.  As if on cue, she sat back and he thought she might lie down.  But she was merely leaning into the edge of the desk, wedging herself between it and him.  She picked up the tips of the tie and slid it back and forth along his neck, _exactly as he had imagined_ , then pulled on the ends like reigns, rocking herself against him, trying to envelop him with four layers of clothing between them.  Maybe more than his own desire for her, he was overcome with the desire to give her what she wanted, if only he knew what that was.   _Don’t_.

 She reached behind and up under her shirt and unclasped her bra, pulling it out from under the shirt through one armhole. _I get it.  It’s okay as long as we’re dressed._ It somehow made sense to him too.  He moved his hand over her breast, where her nipple spoke its mind plainly through the filter of her shirt.  He placed his mouth over it desperately and she sighed.  

 As he sharpened the tip of her nipple through the fabric with his tongue, he thought of the tapes in his drawer - how much more explicit they were, and how much less satisfying. He twisted and drained the fabric in his mouth, wringing out the taste of her skin mixed with soapy detergent. He moved to her other nipple, ran his teeth along the edge of it.

 Her head nodded off to one side.  “Ohhh,” she said simply and effectively.   _My dick is going to unzip itself any minute,_ he thought.  He watched her rise and fall before him and thanked someone – anyone – he wasn’t coming in his pants (yet).  He was not sure how much longer he would last.

 Her chin was dropped, her mouth bright red.  She was close.  He so badly wanted to pull her shirt down and see if her nipples reddened as well, but he didn’t dare interrupt her.  She sunk into him, her fingers clutching his shoulderblades and the bare soft tops of her breasts touching his collarbone with wavering intensity as she panted past his ear.

 He wrapped his arms around her torso so he could feel the waves pass through her.  She felt smooth and lithe as her sacrum swayed beneath the palm of his hand.  She moaned very quietly into his ear, “Oh… oh…. Ohhhhhh…,” a sweet, sexy contrast to the rough crushing of her clit against him.  He felt terribly satisfied as she rested her forehead on his shoulder and sighed.  His cock, throbbing angrily below, begged to differ.

 “Mulder,” she said breathily.  She unwrapped herself from him tentatively.  “I think I need to go.”

 “Yes, you do,” he said.

“Friends again?” she asked with a smirk and sliding off his lap.

 He feared if he laughed he would explode.  “Always.”

 He took her face in his hands, as he had been wanting to do since she got out of the hospital, brushed his fingers lightly over the bruises.  She let him, then climbed away, suddenly scrambling for her blazer and shoes, clanging the chair and the desk as she got them.  She turned to look at him as she reached for the doorknob.  “No tapes,” she demanded in what seemed to him a ridiculous turn of events.

 “Scully,” he said, taking her in from tip to tail, crash-course memorizing her for imminent testing.  “I’d be done before I got the drawer open.”   

She stepped outside.  “I hope we’ve cleared the air here, Mulder,” she said impishly.

 “Yes, Scully.”

 “And Mulder. Get rid of that desk.”

He waited until she was gone.

**Author's Note:**

> If you liked it, feel free to make my day and tell me about it. Here, on tumblr as @somekindofseizure, or at somekindofseizure@gmail.com.


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